NO DEAL REACHED IN TALKS TO QUELL MIDEAST FIGHTING

By JANE PERLEZ

Published: October 5, 2000

PARIS, Thursday, Oct. 5—
After more than 12 hours of stormy talks and with clashes continuing in the Middle East, the Israeli and Palestinian leaders and Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright struggled into the early morning today to find a way to stop the violence, but failed to reach an overall agreement, a senior Clinton administration official said.

Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel headed home from Paris this morning, declining an invitation from President Hosni Mubarak to hold further negotiations in Egypt. An American official said Dr. Albright was going to the meeting with Mr. Mubarak and Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, to ''lock things down'' and pin down Mr. Arafat.

Israeli officials were reported to have agreed to withdraw heavy armaments from the West Bank and Gaza, but that part of the overall accord that Dr. Albright was aiming for was not formalized by the parties, American officials said.

There were also reports that the Palestinians would agree to stay away from two flash points in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

But the State Department spokesman, Richard A. Boucher, said that despite continuing ''intense discussions'' that began at 10 a.m. Wednesday and ended not long before 3 a.m. today, the United States was not ''laying claim to any agreement.''

Dr. Albright had summoned Mr. Barak and Mr. Arafat to Paris to try to dampen the violence that has resulted in the deaths of more than 60 Palestinians and threatens to unravel many of the gains made in seven years of Middle East peacemaking by the Clinton administration.

According to accounts from diplomats involved in what turned into a chaotic flurry of talks that also involved the French president, Jacques Chirac, and the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, the major sticking point was how an investigation should be conducted into the bloodletting. Mr. Arafat stood by his insistence that an investigation should be international, preferably involving the United Nations, while Mr. Barak was opposed to that, diplomats said.

Mr. Mubarak has been one of Mr. Arafat's key allies but also heads the first Arab country to have signed a peace treaty with Israel. It was clear, diplomats said, that Mr. Arafat needed the ''cover'' of a fellow Arab leader -- whose participation in the talks would make it easier to sell an agreement to Palestinians -- and would wait until the session in Egypt to complete an overall accord to stop the violence.

[After Mr. Barak flew back to Israel, The Associated Press quoted some American officials as saying that Mr. Arafat might not go to Egypt either. But Agence France-Presse quoted a Palestinian spokeswoman, Leila Shahid, as saying that Mr. Arafat had left Paris and flown to Egypt to attend the talks.]

The violence continued in the Palestinian territories Wednesday and spread beyond the borders of Israel and the Palestinian territories. In Mr. Mubarak's capital, Cairo, and in the Syrian capital, Damascus, thousands of university students protested the deaths of Palestinians.

In Cairo about 1,500 students stoned a supermarket belonging to the British retail company Sainsbury's, asserting that the owner was Jewish. In Damascus, university students pelted the United States Embassy with stones, branches and rubbish. And in the Jordanian capital, Amman, the police fired tear gas and used batons to disperse about 800 people who tried to march on the Israeli Embassy.

Where just last week she was playing peacemaker trying to mediate an overall accord between the Israelis and Palestinians, Dr. Albright found herself in Paris trying to extinguish the flames of the worst violence between the two sides since 1996.

She was accompanied by the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, George J. Tenet, who worked out the security cooperation arrangement between the Israelis and the Palestinians in 1998.

At one point on Wednesday evening, the talks became so heated that Mr. Arafat stormed out of a meeting at the residence of the American ambassador, saying, according to reporters who overheard the incident: ''This is humiliation. I cannot accept it.''

Dr. Albright was heard in the same dialogue to order the security guards to ''shut the gates,'' so that the Palestinian leader could not leave the compound in central Paris.

According to the account of a Reuters correspondent, Dr. Albright ran after Mr. Arafat, urging him not to leave. The gates closed in front of Mr. Arafat's car, and he got out and returned to the meeting.

The two leaders arrived in defiant moods. Mr. Arafat, whose people are at a boiling point over the visit last Thursday of the right-wing Israeli opposition leader, Ariel Sharon, to the Muslim holy sites atop the Old City of Jerusalem, and over the killings since, was under pressure not to come at all.

Mr. Barak, who was accompanied by the deputy chief of staff of the Israeli Army, Moshe Yaalon, announced on arrival that he would have no part of an international investigation into the violence.

During the meetings, the general forcefully defended the use of live ammunition by Israeli security forces, officials said.